Exploring software developers’ work practices: Task differences, participation, engagement, and speed of task resolution

Abstract

In seeking to understand the processes enacted during software development, an increasing number of studies have mined software repositories. In particular, studies have endeavored to show how teams resolve software defects. Although much of this work has been useful, we contend that large-scale examinations across the range of activities that are commonly performed, beyond defectrelated issues alone, would help us to more fully understand the reasons why defects occur as well as their consequences. More generally, these explorations would reveal how team processes occur during all software development efforts. We thus extend such studies by investigating how software practitioners work while undertaking the range of software tasks that are typically performed. Multiple forms of analyses of a longitudinal case study reveal that software practitioners were mostly involved in fixing defects, and that their engagement covaried depending on the nature of the work they were performing. Furthermore, multiple external factors affected speed of task resolution. Our outcomes suggest that behavioral and intrinsic issues may interact with extrinsic factors becoming significant predictors of the speed of software task resolution.

Participation in community-based free/libre open source software development tasks: the impact of task characteristics

“…We start with one task characteristic that has been studied extensively in group research, namely task type (e.g. Fang et al, 2005-6;Licorish and Macdonell, 2017). Numerous classifications of task types have been proposed to describe differences in the tasks performed by teams (Stewart and Barrick, 2000).…”

“…Despite the practical and theoretical importance of tasks, the details of how developers choose tasks have received only limited attention in FLOSS research (Ehls and Herstatt, 2015). For example, in a longitudinal study of the projects using IBM's Rational Jazz repository, Licorish and Macdonell (2017) found that software practitioners engaged most intensively (i.e. exchanged more messages) in enhancement tasks, followed by defect-fixing tasks and support tasks, which demonstrated that software practitioners' engagement depended on the nature of the work they were performing.…”

Programmer eXperience: A Systematic Literature Review

“…In [22], the authors explain that the tasks of fixing bugs are normally carried out by programmers. Nevertheless, they are more involved in those tasks involving new characteristics or functions of the software.…”

The Predicting Success Factors of Mobile Applications Development: Organizational Perspectives

“…It requires innovative skills (Huntley (2011)), teamwork (Licorish and MacDonell (2017), interactive ability (Capretz and Ahmed (2010)), cognitive reasoning (Ahmed et al (2012)), and good mental representation (Ahmed et al (2013)) to develop successful software. Hence, mobile apps created by a team of software experts and a team staffed with skilled individuals will be more successful (Siau et al (2010)).…”